


To Marvel and to Praise

by fluffernutter8



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, half nonsense ficlet, overthinking wizard elitism toward Muggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 00:29:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2487782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James is trying some early morning spellwork. Lily objects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Marvel and to Praise

“Come on, bloody thing, I know you want the magic.”

"I wish," says Lily from the doorway, "That it was unusual for me to wake up on a Saturday morning and find my husband saying oddly suggestive things to a comic book he’s holding at wandpoint."  
  
James grins up at her. “Well, love, your life would be a far more boring place.”  
  
He’s sitting on the ugly pink carpet in what she calls the spare room and he calls the “we can unpack the boxes tomorrow” room. She shoves one of said boxes back against the wall, making room to sit beside James. He’s only in boxers, although it’s December and he’s all unpadded bony muscle. She’s in her dressing gown, flannel and uncommonly matronly for her and sinfully comfortable, but she cuddles up against him anyway. She rests her chin against his shoulder.  
  
“So what have the Avengers done to you this time?”  
  
“It’s really what I’ll be doing for them.” James looks down at the comic. Lily sometimes thinks that no one- not Professor McGonagall, not her mum’s dad who was so solemn that he scared her as a child- is more focused than James with a problem. "I'm trying to get the bloody things to move, but it's not there yet. Don't worry though, I'll get it."  
  
"Thank you for setting my mind at ease. Now if you’ll tell me why exactly you’re trying to get them to move, the rest of me can be at ease as well.” James moves aside the fabric of her dressing gown and slides a hand down the back of her neck. The group of muscles between her shoulders, the one they’ve nicknamed the “Marauder cluster,” is tensed.  
  
James grins. “It’s really not a worry. Just imagine what it will be like to open up the new Avengers, flick your wand once, and have them all move.” He looks her square in the face, eyes childish and wide behind his glasses. “Lily. When I figure it out, it’s going to be so bloody _cool_.”

She had gotten him the first Avengers comic, picking it up almost absently when she had been browsing a bookstore in London. He had been confused at first (“Something from Muggle London?”) but he had loved it once he started reading (“We don’t have anything like this! All we’ve got is bloody _Martin Miggs the Mad Muggle_ , and the only thing that’s good for is getting Sirius to shut up. I swear, you hold up a copy and he goes right to sleep.”). Lily glances at the comic, and then up at James. “I thought it was already cool.”  
  
"Course it is," he laughs. "The Muggles got this one almost right, it just needs something a little more." He starts fiddling with his wand again, tilting his head a little. He had wanted to go into spell creation, but the war had ended that dream.  
  
Lily sits frozen beside him. They've never really talked about this before, not when they were fighting their way through their first years of school or talking for hours by the fire during their last. He had never taken Muggle Studies; even when she hadn't liked him, she had always known that James was Ancient Runes and Arithmancy, squinting darkly through heavy-rimmed glasses. He never met her parents, who died the summer before sixth year, never saw them for more than a minute at King's Cross at the beginning and end of terms. He came with her to Petunia's wedding, Easter holiday of seventh year, but spent most of the reception in the cloakroom with Lily, letting her dry her eyes on his heavy silk bowtie as she cried because Petunia barely wanted her there and because half the cousins whispered behind her back and because her mum wasn't there and wouldn't be there.  
  
She's never really seen him around Muggles. And she knows he’s not a bigot, she knows that he’s filled with just as much anger as she is by the headlines that appear in the Prophet and those that don’t, but it’s not like he’s had much experience with anyone not-magical.  
  
They had a television in their old apartment, and had even moved it into the new house, but when they started adding extra wards it had done something funny to the signal and everything came in as Latin now. She's taken him to the cinema, and he loves Star Wars far too much. But there's a tone that wizards use to talk about Muggles, like they're six-year-olds who have solved a math problem meant for older children. Even Arthur Weasley, Gideon and Fabian's brother-in-law who clearly loved Muggles and had spent both of their brief meetings interrogating her on smoke detectors, had that tone of amazement and head-patting pride.  
  
"Why is it only almost right?" She never used to let her voice get high around him, suppressing her natural stress reaction, but it scales up now.  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
"Why is it almost right? Why isn't it just good?"  
  
It's always strange to see James off-balance, and especially when it happens quickly. There’s a moment when he looks like he’s surfacing from deep below, a gaping, blinking minute of air intake that’s so different from any of his usual expressions. “Well,” he says, careful and a little confused, “They don’t have everything, do they? We have all these potions and our spells can heal things that Muggles can’t and...Lily, we can fly.”  
  
“But Muggles can fly too.” Her hands flutter upward; she doesn’t even know what she’s doing with them. “And we have medicine, and surgery, and a thousand years of storytelling. We don’t have magic, but we’ve figured out how to do so much. We’re not just wandering through life wishing we had magic. We’ve made wonders without it.”  
  
The carpet shuffles a little, a polyester sound as James shifts himself to look at her fully. The comic book falls to the floor by his feet. He adjusts his glasses, peering at her honestly. “You keep saying ‘we.’ D’you not feel like you’re one of us?”  
  
Lily feels a trickle of love in her, for his seriousness and his decade-old glasses and his grown-too-fast frame. “Of course I do, and I wouldn’t trade being able to do magic for anything in the world. But I’ll also always be one of them and I’m proud of that.” She picks up the brightly colored comic, holds it so they can both see close up. James squints at it, and she realizes once again that she has gambled recklessly with her potential future childrens’ eyesight. “The first of these is drawn by hand, by someone who paints the whole thing, stroke by stroke. And then it’s printed, not with a thousand enchanted quills, but with a machine, something that was invented to copy the words and the colors from the first. It doesn’t need improving. Muggles are bloody brilliant all on their own.”  
  
She nestles back against him, letting him take that in. When he begins speaking, she looks up at him, from her angle only managing a glimpse of the pale skin by his chin where not even stubble comes in yet. “Well, if I’m not going to be working on my spellwork with the unimprovable Muggle comic book, maybe we can partake in another bloody brilliant Muggle invention.”  
  
Lily groans and sits up. “They’re playing Star Wars in town again, aren’t they?”  
  
“I just want to take advantage of all the Muggle world has to offer, just like you taught me.” He roughens his voice, but if she hadn’t seen the movie as many times as he had, she wouldn’t know who he was trying to imitate. “You’re the brains, sweetheart.”  
  
She stands, pulls him to his feet. “We can go,” she says, “But Han Solo is on the never again list.”  
  
He slings an arm around her, and as they leave the room, he whispers in her ear. “You should know by now that there isn’t any such list for me.”  
  
“You’re bloody lucky I married you anyway, you know.”  
  
“Believe me, I know.”


End file.
